John William Hill, Hudson River Valley with Waterfall
Watercolor and Gouache, 14 x 19 in. (35.6 x 48.3 cm)
Hudson River Valley with Waterfall
John William Hill began his career as a topographical painter and printmaker. About 1855 he read John Ruskin’s Modern Painters and, under the English critic’s influence, altered his style to produce highly detailed landscapes.
By the 1860s Hill had adopted the hatching and stippling technique used by the British and American Pre-Raphaelites. Dictated by John Ruskin’s prescription for “truth to nature,†Hill also began to work outdoors in broad daylight, which produced a tonal equivalence between foreground and background in his watercolors. For this reason—and because the Pre-Raphaelite artists suppressed evidence of brushstrokes—his work often appears photographic. As a Pre-Raphaelite, Hill favored a high, nearly unbroken, horizon that emphasized topographical features at the expense of sky and atmosphere.
